Interesting they kept that strategy even after spinning out that group. Curious if they managed to keep anyone from that team to help with this product.
>In 2019, Levandowski was indicted on 33 federal charges of alleged theft of self-driving car trade secrets. In August 2020, Levandowski pled guilty to one of the 33 charges, and was sentenced to 18 months in prison.
>He was pardoned less than six months later on January 20, 2021, the last day of Donald Trump's presidency.
But I think this is a smart move to join forces, and will give the consumer healthy competition in this space.
1. Lack of LiDAR sensors. Vision is still not (and IMHO will never be) an adequate replacement.
2. Waymo/Cruise etc. can upgrade their taxis easily with capabilities over time. Tesla is restricted by their promise that FSD will work on previously shipped cars.
So, right now it's like a trial experiment with FSD, but I definitely feel like a data advantage would play out into a higher safety rating before it's in GA. Maybe eventually others will catch up, that could be quicker than longer, but it's a valid potential advantage for Tesla.
(For whatever reason my apartment building is NP-impossible to deliver to)
Why can I have a seat at my house with controls and drive my Uber/18 wheeler from my house?
* Google Ventures owns a non-trivial stake in Uber.
* Google infamously filed a lawsuit alleging that Uber stole trade secrets from Waymo.
* Uber made an early decision to run on-prem instead of on the cloud (GCP, AWS, etc.) because they feared, rightly so, that Google might launch a competitor to Uber.
* And now they are partnering and merging their core businesses.
What's going on here?
Outsider speculation follows: Uber under Kalanis brazenly stole Google tech, and then settled out of court and promised to be BFFs - with money generally flowing towards Google. Uber in return got a very damaging lawsuit dropped. Uber's self-driving project subsequently got shut down after it ran over and killed a pedestrian without braking. This is what's going on
"please come to the door", "no, please come outside", "i can't leave my baby, please come to the door", "i can't leave my car next to a hydrant, please come outside"
Now it's going to be a lot more interesting
The vast majority of rides in the US - and even in a place like Florida that's a swamp where it rains literally every day - happen under just fine conditions for Waymo.
This is fine for a taxi service.
If you make 10x as much profit in the vast majority of cases - you'll let someone else pick up the scraps in the edge cases.
It's almost as if Waymo & Uber considered weather...
Suggests a natural partnership with Cruise.
https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/27/anthony-levandowski-former...
The optics on this are totally not absolute dog shit.
I know these topics are important and the feelings are understandable but the problem is that on an online forum, this kind of rhetoric becomes just-more-internet-drama-noise, which doesn't do anybody any good and drowns out the quieter, more curious conversation we're hoping for here.
I know some taxi companies have apps now, but if I’m going that route, I don’t see the point of not using Lyft.
Conventional "radio controlled" taxi was the eventual solution I used to get us out of there.
1. Driving without the physical feedback that comes from acceleration, braking, taking a turn too fast, etc.. is really hard. Maybe they could overcome this with simulators of some sort, but I expect that would be too cost prohibitive.
2. I want the driver that can think to have skin in the game. I don’t want them to be able to drive off a cliff, or in to a crowd, from the comfort of their couch.
You could probably overcome this with some sort of hybrid model that simply doesn’t allow stuff like this. But at that point you’re still having to develop some pretty sophisticated self driving technology, and you still have to pay a driver. Not sure who is motivated to do this.
3. What’s the point? You still have to pay a driver either way. Sure you get some cost savings by being able to switch out tired drivers instantly. But in the end, the most expensive cost is paying someone to sit there and drive.
That's a huge money saver.
Additionally recruiting truck drivers is difficult to do so maybe having a work from home job would make it easier.
It's not that it's point less it's that some people just don't see the point.
I don't know just seems like an idea worth pursuing for a million reasons, including being able to outsource driving or find the best drivers in the world. Also.mikitary reasons. Save lives with a remote controlled tank.
with autonomous/remote vehicles you have a fleet of driver-less vehicles that are capable of fully-autonomous operation in some circumstances but are remotely monitored/controlled for situations they can't handle.
this means that you can have a remote driver who is continually switching between driving different vehicles and only driving in the situations where actually needed and profitable.
with driver based transportation when you get into low utilization hours then drivers and cars have to be pulled of the street, the drivers who are working spend more time sitting unprofitably, and they have to driver further to pick up rides.
in a remote scenario you can keep all of your driver-less cars on the street (parked) and your remote driving staff takes control of the car closest to each ride request to pick up and deliver that ride so they spend much more time driving with much less mileage waste.
But the goal is to completely eliminate the driver, which increases efficiency a lot.
the big blocker, and why autonomous/remote vehicles are not being rolled out more widely, is that remote requires lots of very reliable low latency bandwidth.
5G (mmWave 5G in particular) is a key enabling technology. until you get mmWave 5G or some comparable technology the bandwidth for remote at scale doesn't exist.
Unless it’s shift change or you’re in the wrong neighbourhood or have the wrong skin colour.
https://www.flightglobal.com/airlines/how-safe-were-commerci...
But a federal pardon is for federal crimes. So if a state such as New York convicted you then a presidential pardon won't save you.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Clinton_pardon_controvers... especially Marc Rich
First, you're utterly wrong about how rainy cities are[1]. Most of the population of the US lives in a place that has more than 100 rainy days per year. The Northeast Corridor by itself has 50 million people and 120+ annual rainy days.
It also doesn't need to be "raining heavily". It can also be raining lightly, snowing, foggy, dusty, or smoky.
But even if you're right and it's 10%, the predictability becomes a huge issue. I've spent my whole life on the East Coast, and you never know if it's really going to rain until it does or doesn't. The forecast changes literally minute to minute.
1. https://www.currentresults.com/Weather/US/average-annual-pre...
First, you are utterly wrong with your facts.
100 rainy days per year does not equal 2400 hours of rain per year.
It's closer to 500 hours of rain per year = 5.7% of the time.
Realistically, you're looking at the VAST majority of cities Uber being able to operate in 99% of the time.
Additionally - "rain" does not equal downpour. Waymo can drive in light rain.
And guess what - when it's downpouring, people crash MUCH MORE (fun fact - my father almost killed my hyrdoplaning in a downpour to get to my brother's basketball game).
Maybe it's not the worst thing in the world if people aren't on the roads nearly dying in the middle of The Perfect Storm (<1% of the time) to get places they probably don't really need to get to in the first place...
I can tell you with confidence they have not really put effort into weather and it’s a problem “to be solved later”.
It’s all a joke. If we actually wanted this, it would be long haul A to B routes. Turning semi trucks into rail.
Self-driving was already slowing down before the era of free money. So I expect this is just PR to set expectations for Uber and prepare for a scenario where Uber is eventually swallowed by someone else.
The article to me (an Automotive EE/CE of 20 years) that “Fairy dust makers combine efforts to bring genie wish program forward”.
Ah, the Internet, where people who know absolutely nothing about a topic make bold assertions about it with 100% confidence.
https://blog.waymo.com/2022/11/using-cutting-edge-weather-re...
I’ve been in at least four fully self-driving dev / S0 / drivable buck vehicles and they are absolute garbage imo. We had one planned demo that was delayed because of fog in 2020, not road fog, but crap on the LiDAR glass. How many have you directly worked with?
You’ll be happy to know it isn’t just weather that makes this all fake though.
Road crown, even minor, but especially major in the northwest. Reflections, refractions. Lights and electronic billboards. Potholes. Missing road paint. ANY sort of road work at all. “Unhomed” people washing windshields. Squirrels (day) and mice/rats (night). Other bad drivers. Just plain dirty vehicles, self and others. Dust.
It’s all garbage. If we were serious it would be long haul, V2V V2I (vehicle to infra/vehicle). But yea yea, Waygo says they solved weather so just post their claim and you win! Reality can’t compete with marketing, except it always does.
When a sort of pitch was made to an exec where the car has to crash into a tree or a cyclist, he said the bike. Because you aren’t going to pay $80,000 for your car to choose your death.
If you look at car ownership as owning a weapon, it does only make sense that you’ll have to prioritize for the owner.
But really, we aren’t even remotely to trolley problem. The systems BARELY detect and react properly to single issues, let alone detecting multiple and selecting between them.
I honestly think it’s a scam that was popular in the era of Free Money, and I’m so glad that is temporarily on pause.
Every serious company has put significant effort into testing with weather (note: not all weather conditions and not the same testing as traditional automotive). They've also put effort into handling all the other scenarios you've mentioned. Waymo does pose estimation to better handle construction workers and traffic cops, for example.
Also the TAM numbers should make it clear why long distance freight isn't getting as much attention. Surely your employer has shared their outlook internally?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGbMnLCXXxU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qiD9l72uFCg
Waymo driving in fog:
With the Uber app, Uber will show both options when they're both available. It allows waymo to offer a lower SLA/SLO while still gradually fielding a service. It also allows for easier fallback if a waymo vehicle is taking too long to arrive.
There is so much upside in a few months for only one side of that deal… That was always the issue with Uber promising self-driving cars: human drivers have an unknown, uncontrollable deadline.
And it might be not something that an Alphabet company wants to do risk/ reputation-wise. Better to offload bad press (both related to ride sharing in general, and autonomous vehicles) onto an entity which is already "hated".
Like how they can "just spin up" a messaging app?
Building companies and customer bases is really, really hard. Microsoft tried like three times to build a Github competitor. They still have at least one of those attempts (Azure DevOps). They still bought Github. An interesting product technically, sure, but: its where the people are at. It was worth it.
Getting into a new market didn’t work for videos so they bought YouTube, it didn’t work for their social network, and it didn’t work for a ton of other cancelled projects.
Google has already done this. Waymo One is the name of Google's app, and it's live and serving customers already in Phoenix, AZ. Completely driverless - nobody but the passenger in the car.
... and the government would (again) look into Google using anticompetitive tools to expand its market reach and stifle other companies in the area.
... having a "use Google/Waymo ride hailing" only in a few cities would lose a significant part of the network effect that Uber has (you can likely use Uber in any city - not just a limited few).
The app, sure. But Uber also has the aggression necessary to expand across the world and bulldoze/ignore/skirt/rewrite local taxi laws fairly successfully.
There is no way waymo/alphabet would manage that. They'd nicely ask permission, and in most cities permission would be denied by incumbent taxi operators and uber drivers who don't want their jobs taken.
Uber has pivoted to doing partnerships with any self driving player that is looking for a customer base. Waymo doesn't have the tech nor the desire to figure out logistics to compete with Motional or Cartken in the delivery space, for example. None of these players can instantaneously ramp up to millions of vehicles on the road; they physically don't have enough hardware and the age of money burning for growth at all costs is behind us. I can't imagine Waymo has bigger utilization than Bolt, or even Alto.
The way I see it, Uber is more like McDonalds: "easy" to copy from conceptual perspective but also a globally recognizable brand with an undeniably strong customer acquisition arm.
Waymo still has a lot to prove to themselves in terms of ROI. Customer acquisition would be even more expenses on top of the already expensive tech, partnering with Uber to offload these costs to a proven customer acquisition player makes sense for them.
Uber sold their self driving division because they killed someone in Arizona due to negligence. And then Anthony Lewandowski happened. Those two incidents complete deflated Uber's hopes to have autonomous vehicle technology. I'm pretty sure they would still be pursuing self driving if not for those incidents.
They also don’t work. At least not by any sane definition. Sure, if you’ve mapped the area in advance, nothing changed,the weather is nice and nothing unusual happens all might be okay but otherwise it’s a shitshow.
Human drivers are cheaper and more versatile. There is no point in this other than trying to persuade the markets Google hasn’t spanked millions on a dead end.
Uber's play is as a platform. They win if there are several SDC providers (with working autonomy). As an analogy, they're Android; they want to own the network and have multiple operators plug into the Uber app, while the hardware makers don't want to do the work to spin up an expensive 2-way marketplace. Waymo is playing at the iPhone game. They want to be the biggest market operator, and can get away with not owning the top of the funnel for the time being. If other operators fall far behind in progress, Waymo will spin up the investment to vertically integrate and try to siphon Uber customers off that way.
We're setting up for the biggest "winner take all" product-market fit in history.
Besides, ~99.9% of people won't have the expertise to make an informed decision on which provider to use (if they even have a choice).
The only losing scenario is if one is particularly bad, leading to a ton of regulation (like a FAA for SDCs).
Uber is kind of an exception, i don't use their services because i consider them scum.
https://money.cnn.com/quote/quote.html?symb=UBER
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/uber/holders/
Seems like pocket change compared to Alphabet’s other investments.
Please no. We don’t need the ultimate “startup that was unprofitable and never could be profitable that was just trying to get bought by big tech” example to fuel more nonsense.
I'm pretty sure the Waymo Driver costs more than a human driver at this point. Obviously they want to make it cheaper eventually but who knows when that will happen.
There are still System X exchanges in the UK to this day, it works fine, so why not. Eventually as copper last miles are discontinued these exchanges will be virtualised, and in some sense System X is then banished to museums like the Strowager electro-mechanical systems I saw as a child.
It's too late for that. The regulatory pendulum for mergers like this is swinging the other way. The public was indifferent to big tech gobbling up the competition when times were good. Now that money costs money again, people with normal (i.e., not overpaid tech) salaries are feeling the squeeze, which means politicians need a cause that makes their voters feel like they're fighting for them. The giants must be punished.
Uber opened up people to the freedom of going anywhere and getting a taxi. This took market from a lot of players. But there was always a market it could not take.
Waymo will have to do the same. Carve out a specific market share for itself, from a lot of transportation options.
Google's culture isn't really built around providing human support to users. I believe there is also lots of onboarding involved for restaurants so Google may struggle there.
With that said, I am constantly hit up by outsourced Google reps for Adwords + Firebase but I think the average customer has a much higher transaction volume with much better margins than a restaurant would.
This seems like a play to attract users from the most popular ridehail platform and eventually funnel them to the Waymo app. I don’t believe users are loyal to ridehail apps like they are to social networks (I don’t use Uber because my friends use it) and would jump to a service that is cost competitive and autonomous. Or, as I said another comment, maybe they are setting the stage to be just a technology provider to ridehail companies and let them deal with all the operational overhead.
Have you used Uber? It's impossible to speak to someone
Uber can't be profitable without autonomous vehicles, so the answer IMHO here is simple.
For Alphabet, the answer is similarly simple - they'll partner with literally anyone to get distribution.
The first half of your comment implies that Uber has a really bad negotiating position, so Waymo must be extracting most of the value.
The second half says that Alphabet (the majority owner of Waymo) will "partner with literally anyone" which would presumably mean Uber is extracting most of the value.
So which is it?
If the self-driving and/or roll-out is a disaster - blame Uber.
Uber has a terrible reputation. I don't think too many people will think twice about Uber taking the blame.
says who?
They can start adding support one city at a time. And for the Uber user, the Waymo option only pops up for you if the ride you requested is within the Waymo range and they have cars available.
This way they can also collect tons of data about how users respond to the offers, affinity to driverless cars per region, price elasticity, etc. And then dial the supply up or down as they wish. They can even start covering a city with just two cars if they wanted to, and then build popularity and word of mouth.
On the other hand if they started with their own app, the lack of car coverage in most areas (due to low car supply, pending regulations, etc) would quickly frustrate users who would then switch to another app, so user retention would be a nightmare.
Not to mention side-stepping all the customer-facing operations of running such a business, which Alphabet does not have an affinity for.
I don't think Uber has anything to fear from Waymo:
(1) It will take years for Waymo to ramp up to "independence" scale. How many cars do they have now, and how many would they need? How long will it take them to negotiate new regulations with every city and state? 5 years?
(2) This deal is probably not exclusive. Uber can strike a similar deal with Cruise as well. Uber becomes the Amazon of driving services, a platform gating access, with all the data.
(3) Having a big money company behind them is good. And if Waymo acquires Uber in 3 years, it's not necessarily a bad thing for Uber.
> The collaboration with Uber gives Waymo’s self-driving technology a second path to commercialization. As Katherine Barna, head of PR at Waymo, told TechCrunch, Waymo is “building a Driver, not a vehicle.” That “driver-as-a-service” model is similarly how Waymo intends to commercialize autonomous trucks, and it means that the company can lease out its AV technology, rather than being the owner-operator of that technology.
Waymo wants to be both owner-operator of their vehicles for their Waymo One taxi service and be a “technology provider” for other ridehail companies. I wonder if the latter is a more lucrative business model. Less operational costs due to someone else running the service, ability pass on liability to them and they can just develop/maintain the tech.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/23/waymos-self-driving-cars-w...
Uber is a software-powered company, but their business model is squarely a marketplace. Running a marketplace is an economics problem, not a technical one. The actual dollars are made from the neverending work of balancing cost of acquisition from both sides of the market, while keeping all the logistics from overwhelming the operational costs. This is true whether it's finance (e.g, health insurance), goods (Ebay), or services (Uber).
There's a big huge gap between this and say, SaaS (trading money for bytes in a specific order and occasional human help) or a super hard hardware problem. When a company tries to have both, they often get stuck with two mediocre businesses rather than one amazing one.
The other key component is just Dara's style specifically. His past successes comes from in other marketplaces (Expidia), and he knows that running marketplaces is all about shaping deals to feed both markets. Despite the history between the two companies, if a deal is obvious, he'll find a way to make it happen. Google isn't prepared for a huge push into a consumer transport service, and Uber isn't willing to bet $20B on a tech hardware moonshot. The gravity for this deal makes it inevitable.
From personal experience: I can say that I never worked for Dara, but I did work for his cousin, and the whole family has the same style. They are very effective at execution, especially when it comes to shaping deals like this. This will work to the benefit of both Google and Uber.
It seems counter intuitive to me that they do a strategic partnership with Uber given low switching cost of using another app if it had meaningful cost benefits to the consumer. Additional Google owns the Android platform so could leverage that to it's advantages as well.
But Uber is already in a world of low margins marketplace matching. The deal is likely highly favorable to Google in that it need only compete with the the humans so can start to recover some of it's investment without having to directly compete on a platform basis which would be expensive per city high density rollout.
Google won't have the same driver density as Uber for a long time and for an app to be your go to ride system it had to always be fast to get a ride.
For high utilization on Google side also benefits being part of Uber platform of on tap riders.
All said, the existence of Lyft and numerous other transportation apps globally impacts the value Uber can extract. More autonomous vehicles will quickly follow Waymo and an integrated network will dominate at some point. Just like Amazon using its own delivery infra once it reached a certain scale.
I don't see this being a long term relationship. Once a given density is reached Google can leverage Android / Google maps / cost competition to push people over and why would Google / Waymo continue to pay Uber market place margin on "it's phone platform". Google will be leveraging said platform to compete with integrated networks like Tesla, Amazon zoomx, cruise, wherever apple lands and others globally.
If you are a designer with a taste for spilling soup, cold pasta, and involuntarily calzone pizza, I recommend you start looking at options there, because:
- Restaurants operators do not want to leave their kitchen; if there’s a terrasse, waiters already go near the street, but it’s not true for everyone: drive through probably aren’t close enough without the car having an articulated arm.
- Food is messy at any conceivable temperature, and anything that looks even slightly gross is a huge No-No: human drivers have to deal with so many ways to preserve the food not to get yelled at, and all that knowledge is going out of the window without them.
- Customers do not want to leave their sofa. Period. Sometimes, they can’t. Always, they don’t want to — “playing video games” is the traditional excuse for “I can’t right now!” but bowel movements, or other reasons for priority hip movements, or just plain not paying attention. Your car will wait while the food gets cold. And losing money because hangry people inexplicably can’t pay attention to their notifications is not the worst part: their expectations will always be worse. The worst Karens are not the ones at Starbucks, upset that their name is spelled wrong: it’s those you haven’t seen yet because they can’t go to Starbucks because their lack of emotional balance keeps them at home most of the time.
Anyway: exciting concentration event (Alphabet is buying what’s left of Uber for pennies in a year), but there are still miracles to pull off. I, for one, will bow in silence when I finally get to see how one of the few geniuses we have left will fix this.
Waymo One is the name of Google's app, and it's live and serving customers already in Phoenix, AZ.
Imo, the fact that Uber knows this, and is still partnering with Waymo is a sign of weakness bc Waymo's intention is very clearly to own the customer eventually.
The only problem is the fleet size; there's still a waitlist and it can take 20 minutes to get a ride. But that's just because they're waiting on permits to scale up and start charging for autonomous rides in CA.
It's not clear why Uber would choose to direct their customers to a superior product that they can't hope to beat on either price or UX -- except perhaps as a desperate move to squeeze the last dregs of revenue from the human-operated rideshare market before AV operators move in and clean house?
Isn't it or something has changed lately?
For limited scenarios such as geofenced to a city with good weather, it seems that self driving cars (at least Waymo's tech) is good enough, baring some small lapses which are more funny than dangerous. As a general thing everywhere? To me it doesn't look like we're even close (like 10 years) to being there. Also, the problems actually instead of supposedly being solved by self-driving are... very minimal. There will be no noticeable improvement in things that matter the most on the global scale (pollution, congestion, time spent), only marginal practical and maybe financial improvements (there might be more and cheaper taxis).
Self-driving electric trains are already a solved problem that could solve probably the majority of transportation needs, congestion and pollution all in one go.
[1] https://blog.completepayroll.com/fares-driver-pay-and-the-fi....
What does Waymo get out of this? It seems to me like if the value proposition in self driving is there (privacy, consistency, etc), people would be willing to download another app? Especially once word of mouth goes through.
Plus currently the Waymo app has neat features (when the car is on its way to you, it shows you stuff like when it's stopped at a red light or whatever) that Uber probably can't replicate due to API access issues.
I can see Uber drivers sitting in front of computers taking over from the autonomous system to provide a pseudo autonomous experience.
Uber drivers would also need to be trained to do this and Uber needs to setup facilities for this. I don’t believe this is likely.
Waymo sends physical human drivers to a car if the Waymo driver (software) is stuck. Remote humans can reach into the model to fix e.g. label problems (e.g the driver thinks this is a pedestrian but it's actually a life size cardboard Captain Picard, thus it's not a problem to drive very close to it) but they cannot drive the car.
For Uber, it's all about maintaining the stock price.
I was very intrigued until I opened the article and realized you meant a vertical bar.
I suspect that Uber's main added value is a "safer" way for Waymo to increase the reach of their technology with lesser blowback against their own reputation (Uber did this, Uber did that ...), and to make it more mature, even more than the money potentially being exchanged here.
They are still Waymo-branded vehicles. Attempting deflection wouldn’t go well. This is a risky integration pursued for scale.
Whose investors? Uber isn’t taking technology risk. And Waymo has worked in Phoenix for years. Partnering with Uber is a show of confidence in that it suggests their demand limited.
imo the thesis is the same though, I would expect to see Cruise and Lyft partner and/or similar sometime in the near future.
Google has a distribution channel via Android, but I don't think it's strong enough (otherwise Stadia would still be around). They'd still have to build a destination for consumers to remember, in addition to the interface, matchmaking, billing, etc.
I guess in any deal like this, there's the potential for advantage and disadvantage from both angles. As Clay said, a good compromise is one where both parties are dissatisfied.
Are you sure? Below lotsofpulp pointed out that they're not listed as a major holder [1] and there was news in 2019 about them considering selling their stake [2]
But I guess they don't want to wake up the regulatory watchdogs.
In the mobile app it used to be a tab at the top ("rideshare services") but now it's at the bottom of the public transit tab ("also consider").
It used to be a deep integration where you could handle your whole ride without leaving Google Maps, but I think they removed that a few years ago?
If you're a consumer and you want to go from point A to point B you don't want to have to think about whether your route will be in the AV coverage area, or if AVs are able to operate in current weather conditions, or if there are enough AVs available.
You just want to press a button and have some vehicle take you from point A to point B, whether that vehicle has a human behind the wheel or not.
getting their technology working profitably at scale is obviously the first step and it is taking much longer than expected.
> app that is easily replicable
Waymo already has their own app and will continue to. the problem is that if you only have limited service in one small market then nobody has that app installed.
business travel is a large and highly profitable segment of ride sharing and it is dominated by Uber because it has the largest install base.
> What does Uber bring to the table at all?
demand. Waymo only has to accept a ride request if it meets their profitability metrics so this deal is all upside for them. if they have more profitable demand through their own app then they use their fleet for that and if not they fall back to Uber and get some free advertising to Uber customers in the process.
So Waymo doesn't have to duplicate all of what Uber already does, Uber users just order their ride as normally and maybe get a little cost benefit out of there not being a driver or a need to tip them, and Waymo gets to focus on the cars and the driving and rolling out in more cities.
I don't see how Waze or Google factor into this. Not really a competitor to Uber or taxis in general.
Maybe this is just Google finally admitting it sucks at a variety of business processes and needs help.
What? Building an app is the easy part of building an Uber. It's the difference between building a twitter clone (weekend project) and having it beat twitter (hasn't been done yet)
Uber brings the most successful marketplace for riders/drivers and operating with local regulations globally to the table
The bar for success here isn't perfection. Rather, it's whether or not self-driving vehicles are cheaper than human-driven vehicles. Part of the cost of a self-driving vehicle hinges on how often the vehicles end up in failure states necessitating remote human intervention and/or insurance payouts. It's fine if they sometimes fail, they just have to do so infrequently enough to be cheaper. And if Waymo is to be trusted, they already appear to be safer.
Partnering with Uber let's them offer self driving only within pretty well known constraints. Weather, locality, traffic, routes, time, etc.
Just because it’s big doesn’t mean Google will inevitably succeed. Look at Google+, Allo, Duo etc etc. to my mind there’s no guarantee a Google rideshare app would capture mindshare.
Google is so much more integrated in to people's lives than 15+ years ago. Google Maps + Waymo or "Google Taxi" would have millions of customers immediately.
What Google did to Yelp is what might happen to Uber. I think the main point thing stopping is what others have pointed out. Is it worth the reputation? Instead of running their own service just take a nice cut from Uber and let them deal with bad headlines. Especially when the headlines will read Uber "fires" poor single parent uber drivers in favor of robot cars.
Otherwise, it is about as bad of a risk to reward bet as I can think of compared to human drivers.
When you have something unique and useful, people will sign up.
Developing the tech is getting cheaper too (sensing hardware improvements, ML improvements) so the first-mover advantage likely won't lead to stable moats. Competition will be more like Apple/Android where constant improvement (probably on cost) is necessary to maintain a lead.
But if/when fully autonomous vehicles become a reality they will shed their drivers, same as everyone else.
Just want to point out that the failure case of self driving (if this product fails I crash into another car while going 80 mph) makes the race to the bottom slightly less plausible.
Taxis compete on price, safety, quality of service. Virtually all of this value derives from the quality of the FSD implementation. Of course, this will extend to all forms of road transportation eventually. It is going to very much be a winner takes all situation for a number of years (perhaps a decade). The next phase will be a period of high fragmentation as the technology becomes commoditized and a race to the bottom will ensue. The final phase will be consolidation with a few players being best at execution, cost control and finance operations.
Can't you see why Google may not want to do this for dozens of places and handle customer service for rideshare, etc, at scale?
Which is one reason they want to tream up with Uber. They know how hard it is
I think they sold it in 2019 when their lockup expired, but I can only find "they're thinking of doing it" news (https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/03/ceo-david-krane-suggests-g...) and not an announcement.
Also: I don't give a damn if the business isn't publicly traded either. If they're that big they have enough influence over any given market that the public should have the right to know what they're up to.
> Alphabet has a large stake in Uber.
Since Uber is a publicly listed company, its top owners are public information. Which show Alphabet to not have a significant portion of ownership in Uber.
I'm not sure what else Uber could possibly have. Name recognition? More people know Google than Uber. Install base? More people have Android phones than have the Uber app. Drivers? Uber is trying to eliminate its drivers, as this deal shows. Uber is defenseless against Google.
Google owns the action "to google something". Uber owns the action to "get an Uber".
Also, don't underestimate the value of a working business. Google has only ever been successful with a search engine and an ad platform. They've never been success in a consumer product/service. I don't think their corporate structure and business culture makes them likely to succeed in B2C.
Uber has it's flaws, but they've been very reliable as a consumer. And have responsive and helpful support. Imagine having to rely on Google to provide support to a stranded user or resolve a dispute.
$3.28 variable cost per ride is less than what Uber is paying its drivers (median pay is ~$10.88 per ride). I imagine it nets out significantly in SDC's favor after adding back in cost of gas, insurance, and maintenance. And, the $300k should decrease over time.
As terrible as a pedestrian death is, the reality is there's news about Tesla accidents and near-accidents on the news all the time and people still love the brand. Sometimes it's easy to forget that Uber/Amazon/M$/etc hating is not as widespread in the general population as it is among tech bros.
As for Otto, my understanding is Uber pivoted similarly on the freight side, with a partnership w/ Volvo Autonomous Solutions.
The problem is that when others spend on it, Waymo has more leverage over them if the cars are only going to work with the Waymo driver. Perfect vendor lock-in on assets worth $150k each.
What's in it for Uber? Perhaps just a more favorable & longer term deal, but if so, they're essentially handing over the future of their business to Waymo.
That partnership makes sense in the transition period when Waymo can’t buy enough cars to scale for football matches, handle edge cases, and build a larger fleet operation team. I think the individual Uber talent (operations, software, etc.) are great. Their experimentation team, for instance, is 100% something I’d recommend acquiring wholesale. Even with a thousand better options at Google, I’m sure their back-end solutions are work acqui-hiring. But Uber itself? The confusing everything app? It’s a bad brand whose toe-stepping values are misaligned with what anyone is trying to do (except maybe Tesla) and with a ton of tech debt. I know there was a lot of effort to escape it, but I don’t see great synergies. With Booking, maybe?
Nobody else has managed to get end to end AI working, but this sort of stuff scales with training data, and tesla has the opportunity to collect far more than any other manufacturer, with possibly 1000x the number of cars collecting video data of the next closest competitor.
And the thing about end to end AI is I suspect that if anyone can get it working at all, it may not have the issues with the long tail of unusual situations that other approaches have. Things like "Someone has drawn a picture of a bear on the road in chalk, should I drive over it or around it?" might be answered better by the end to end system than a rules based system.
If all of those things work out, then Tesla will win this race. Otherwise, they'll lose.
Debatable.
So many of their issues are to do with the lack of LiDAR sensors.
The second half said that Alphabet had choices on who to partner with, so they could play them against each other, so Waymo had the upper hand in negotiations.
I suppose some of these could be drivers, but I believe Uber's biggest department is operations, which is one of the reasons it's so expensive to enter new markets. Can't scale operations in the same way you can scale development.
Google would have to do something similar to launch their own ride-share app powered by Waymo, so could make sense to just keep Uber in the middle.
That's 1000% better customer service than I'd ever expect from big G. Google would probably charge me a cancellation fee for not taking the trip, shut down my account for having the temerity to complain I'd been stranded, and then followed up with automated email confirming they made the right decision after review.
It's been shown through computer modeling that road congestion emerges as a function of both vehicles/road segment/time unit and human driving behavior.
Remove the humans from the driver's seat, and your effective road capacity goes up significantly without doing anything else.
And still, even if autonomous cars are drastically more efficient, with a passenger per car the space use is still drastically less efficient (even the biggest highways will have a fraction of the capacity of a proper metro).
Tesla and Waymo are arguably pretty close in self-driving technology, so there's already another player. Uber could just buy a bunch of Tesla's once their tech is good enough for autonomous driving.
No they aren't. The latest FSD betas have been widely panned.
And the lack of LiDAR sensors means Tesla still fails to accurately define the bounding boxes for scene objects.
That includes electrical and maintenance. That's still less than a regular car, but it's still a larger number than most people consider.
It would be possible to say its less, though I'd tend to suggest it would be more than the Prius since there's no human custodian of the car to handle the "pull over, I've gotta puke" situations which can add unexpected expenses.
There's also things like fines when the car doesn't observe the laws (who gets the ticket if it causes a traffic jam, cuts off a bus, running over a fire hose, or fails to give way to a pedestrian in a crosswalk - https://www.forbes.com/sites/jimgorzelany/2018/03/29/first-a... https://sfist.com/2023/01/31/sf-regulators-have-had-it-with-... )
Other comments elsewhere are "No but if you're Google you can put it on literally every android phone quite quickly." and "All Google would need to do is push a notification to every Android phone that has Google Maps (so, all of them) that says "book your next trip through Google maps and the first ten rides are free!" and they're in business."
That sort of approach would very likely be examined by regulators.
Most days, fines are just the cost of doing business. They cut into your profits, sure, but as long as profits >> fine, just pay the fine and keep doing it.
I’m not so sure it would actually solve the problem. I think a more effective and easier solution would be to design cities to be more accessible without cars. That way, traffic would likely be reduced due to fewer humans in the driver’s seats even if they continued commuting. To summarize, in order to achieve a greater road capacity, I think we should focus on replacing the method of commuting that requires taking the road altogether. Subbing it for another method that still uses the road will invoke induced demand.
We still don’t even know how plausible a camera based system is. Human eyes and the human brain are so much more advanced than a computer and cameras, it may not follow that “images are all you need”.
I hope they have tested this by remote-controlling cars using only the camera inputs.
ie. verify a human can safely drive the car using only what the computer sees.
If a human can't safely drive in those conditions, a computer probably can't either.
Plus, a human could drive in a variety of conditions but there’s just so many possible scenarios the car could encounter, and humans crash too, so the real question is what is the relative performance between a human and the machine across thousands of potential or actual crashes. Kinda hard to measure.
You're more than capable of doing this research yourself.
> with a passenger per car the space use is still drastically less efficient
Sorry, this simply isn't the metric for success. It might be your metric, but it certainly isn't the population's metric. A lot of people want to travel comfortably in cars, "mindless pursuit of space efficiency" be damned.
Ubiquitous self-driving vehicles will allow us to eventually eliminate most congestion, and you're just going to have to accept that cars aren't going anywhere.
> you're just going to have to accept that cars aren't going anywhere.
Cars aren't going anywhere, but they're the wrong solution for a variety of reasons (congestion leading to time loss, pollution (including noise pollution), land use efficiency or lack thereof, etc.) for a very big part of transportation needs.
> A lot of people want to travel comfortably in car
And a lot don't and aren't given that option.
> "mindless pursuit of space efficiency" be damned.
Mindless? There's only so much physical space available in the places where people live and work. American cities are often comprised of massive parking lots taking up valuable space that can be put to much better use, simply because most people are forced to commute by car. Give them another option and many (of course not all) would prefer it, which would also make driving much more pleasant for the remaining drivers.
Sure, but that's not the limiting factor at all, which you'd understand if you bothered to do the slightest bit of research outside of your comfort zone.
> And a lot don't and aren't given that option.
That's very true, but it's not one-or-the-other. I am a strong supporter for intensive funding of mass transit systems....for those who want to use them. But that doesn't preclude continued usage of cars.
> massive parking lots taking up valuable space that can be put to much better use
"better" is in the eye of beholder. Car users are generally okay with how space is currently allocated.
If you want change towards increased mass transit, I highly recommend not being hostile about it. There is no need for mass transit to be positioned as a replacement for car use. When you threaten peoples' way of life, that's how you get people actively working against you.
It should come as no surprise that I'm a huge fan of getting around by car, but I would still happily have my tax money go towards bolstering mass transit systems and walkable/cyclable infrastructure for the portion of the population that wants to commute that way.
Edit: then again for such a critical component Tesla might want to make their own solid state LiDAR, or at least license someone’s technology so they can produce them on their own terms.
So any compute issues are not preventing adoption.
It'll be interesting if Cruise ends up partnering with/acquiring Lyft. Although Cruise seem to be still betting on their Origin vehicle.
consumer expectations are much higher than 13 years ago and that's not going to cut it.
If Google was to enter a market at a loss in an effort to use its market dominance in Android to drive out a competitor that would potentially be something that would be considered anticompetitive and US regulators would likely be interested in it.
I don't believe that Google can compete with Uber losing money as it is nor that Google has an appetite for purchasing the necessary vehicles and maintaining them outside of a few test cities for a technology demo. Having driverless taxis also means that they would need to do a better job with end user support (compare the urgency of "help, I'm locked out of my email" and their current resolution time to "help, I'm locked in a car and can't get out!").
LOLOLOL
This is nonsense. Google has more than enough legal resources to handle this. So much so that it would be nothing more than a regular 3-6 month project that would be assigned a small team of lawyers inside their org. It's no different than any other regionally-regulated product launch at large companies.
Not only that but Google has enough money that they could just hire away some folks that work at Uber/Lyft to get a huge jumpstart on any such project. Even if they didn't need such expertise they'd probably still recruit and hire those people just to be safe; to get the perspective of people with experience.
Big companies have big legal organizations and they don't actually operate that differently from the IT orgs that so many of us on HN are used to. For example, they would probably divide up the task on state-by-state basis with lawyers certified to practice law in each respective state assigned as SMEs or to-be-SMEs. They would do their research and for bigger states they might even have county-level SME lawyers or at the very least paralegals that focus on that particular region. Big cities would probably be assigned their own teams of SME lawyers as well.
It's like any given complex programming task: Divide and conquer. Rolling out a new highly-regulated product across a large region is a highly parallelizeable procedure.
Is experience doing this with human drivers all that helpful for building a driverless service? I'd expect the legal and regulatory questions would be very different?
But this will be different for robots though. This is not a moat for Uber.
Hm. This is like --
It's not 1066 any more, there are property rights now.
The original regulatory capture.
Step 1: Ignore the law; establish a fait accompli.
Step 2: Sanctify the new status quo.
Sad for a rule-follower to figure out that this is how things work.
On the other hand, I guess rule-following is low risk. For each William the Conqueror there were thousands of warriors who just got killed on the battlefield. And I'm sure the guy had to work really hard, you know, like nights and weekends.
as someone who has worked at Uber, this is a gross misstatement. It takes a lot to run Uber, far less even to run it at scale globally and with viable unit economics
They could follow Uber's startup model: ignore/break laws and provide false information to regulators.
Nonsense
It would be a huge job. Even for Google
Of course, it would be easier to put together the necessary legal structure now that Uber and Lyft have already both done so. It’s easier to be a follower than a leader. But it would still be much harder for Google than building a mobile app like Uber, which would be right up Google’s alley.
And it isn't the lawyers.
It's the network of riders.
Waymo promised to 10x their scale this year.
Waymo could saturate the territory with empty vehicles waiting for riders on the Waymo app, or it can tap into a fraction of Uber's volume.
I don't think this is even close to correct. Lawyers were hit especially hard in the January layoffs, way more than 6%, and many teams lost their dedicated lawyers entirely (e.g. my team had one lawyer laid off and the other was reassigned to a basket of products instead of just our own).
At least we got FOSS chromium + FOSS android.
That said, things like Google Play Music -> Youtube Music was poorly handled and has permanently shook me. Have been leaving Google since.
Well, if you are referring to IT organizations in firms in the tech industry where that’s the core business (i.e., a value center) you are wrong, they are run more like IT orgs in non-tech firms (cost centers), vigorously minimized to be a bit smaller than they should be to handle routine day-to-day needs effectively, with new, emergent, and non-routine work outsourced.
another big deal is gps accuracy in cities, which is a pretty non trivial problem but at this point a consumer expectation https://www.uber.com/blog/rethinking-gps/
Not sure this particular one would affect Waymo if they were going it alone, since their rollout to each service area would involve designation of pickup & drop off points at airports and collaboration with airports, which they'll have to do either way, but it's definitely a significant difference between Uber 2010 & 2023.
yes, waze had 100M+ users and still failed to have a successful launch with waze carpool. part of the problem is Google is too successful. If a business makes USD 10M a year and takes up a month worth of attention every year from the Alphabet CEO, they will probably shut it down before we can say Google Product Graveyard.
Google is a great company but it has never been truly hungry because it has never faced an existential threat.
Google only needs to put together a one-sided marketplace, where Uber/Lyft had to build a two-sided marketplace. And Google already has a connection to billions (at least hundreds of millions) of potential riders.
All this to try to compete with Uber (which isn't profitable) in a few areas where the legal, political and climate ("we have cars in Chicago but they only run from March 1st to November 1st") options are favorable.
The marketplace is not the biggest issue that Google would need to overcome.
I may have an unusually lazy social circle.
Counterexample, Google Brain didn't make much money, but they still invested in it and spit out Transformers.